Harry Styles: Aperture Review – An upbeat, laid-back, laid-back track designed to embrace strangers on the dance floor | Harry Styles

nAs the proud owner of six Brit hits, three Grammy Awards, and seven UK Top 10 singles, it’s fair to say that Harry Styles has elegantly avoided the potholes that litter the path from former boyband member to solo star. His well-earned confidence means that instead of bridging the gap between 2022’s Harry’s House and last week’s announcement of his fourth album – the confusingly titled Kiss All the Time. Disco, sometimes – with so many one-off releases, faux anniversary variants or curated social media moments, the styles have basically disappeared. In fact, the only thrill his fanbase had was last September when he ran the Berlin Marathon in a very respectable 2 hours and 59 minutes.

Having endured the music industry at the height of its obsession with One Direction-heavy content, there’s something old-fashioned about Styles’ absence between album eras. It’s unlikely to be accidental: Since launching his solo career with his muted, indebted 1970s debut, Styles has portrayed himself as a cross-generational throwback who infuses the present, though it’s one of the sports fashion choices that irritates cisgender conformists. Each album arrived with a list of influences that more closely resembled the lineup found on Old Gray Whistle Test than today’s TikTok algorithms, while 2019’s Fine Line was, as Styles told us, conceived under the influence of that ancient drug, magic mushrooms.

On the surface, kiss all the time. Disco, at times, with its cover photo of Styles wearing oversized 70s glasses under a hanging disco ball, seems to continue the theme. Even the single-aperture length, 5 minutes and 11 seconds — long enough to bother anyone whose attention span has been eroded by social media — seems out of step with the brevity of modern pop music.

But things have changed. His final comeback single, As It Was, was tightly wound and syncopated, reflecting its tense lyrics, but the dancefloor-leaning opener was far looser. Starting out with a simple electronic pulse and a beautiful wobbly beat, it takes time to fully emerge from the nightclub smoke, Styles’ lightly filtered voice slurring lyrics around drinks that reach straight to his knees. What starts out as a skeletal, LCD Pulse-Lite sound system soon begins to build layers, but with no soft guitar in sight. Instead, electronic textures bleed from the edges of the song before the sunlit pre-chorus blossoms into the chorus itself – a chant of “we belong together,” an ode to unity. Expect it to sound great bouncing around the field this summer.

Musically, the styles still hold true to the past, just the references are a little more recent. Aperture has the vibe of early 2010s and bands like Vampire Weekend, Yeasayer and MGMT, mixing electronic music with elements of psych, prog and pop. It also brings back memories of 2000s techno-pop released on Cologne’s Kompakt label. However, lyrically, Styles plays it quite straight. Speaking about the upcoming album on Radio 2, he said he has used his downtime to go out in nightclubs more, to be in a crowd of people rather than playing to one person, and at times Aperture has a slight feel of going to Berlin all at once; People move up, others “walk clean,” he lets the light in, and suddenly everyone around him is his best friend. But there’s also something endearing about that, too. Through the song’s excellent bridge, as some beautiful pianos play, Styles suddenly seems a little lost; “I want to know what safety is,” he sings, before adding: “I don’t know these places.”

Unsure whether she is coming (up) or coming (down), Aperture seeks a happy medium and finds her own safe space. Although not bold enough to scare off his fanbase, the shift in direction still seems bold for one of the few good male pop stars. This confidence remains unchanged.